Faculty Profiles

Site Navigation

Kristen G. Anderson

Kristen G. Anderson, Ph.D. is the Principal Investigator of the Adolescent Health Research Program and an Associate Professor of Psychology at Reed College. Her area of expertise is the developmental psychopathology of addictive behaviors from late childhood through emerging adulthood. Dr. Anderson has specialized in youth alcohol and drug use decision-making in social contexts, longitudinal modeling of process-oriented data, and the integration of personality and social-cognitive models of substance use initiation and maintenance. Dr. Anderson has published extensively and has received research funding from the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the ABMRF: The Alcohol Research Foundation. In 2013-2014, she was as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Anderson is currently the Academic Director of the Summer Institute on Alcohol, Drugs, and Addiction at the University of Amsterdam. She was the principal investigator of the Portland site of Project Options, a national, multisite field trial of a school-based alcohol and drug prevention program funded by NIAAA. A licensed psychologist, Dr. Anderson received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Prior to joining the faculty at Reed, she was a research scientist and clinical faculty member in the UCSD Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry. Dr. Anderson attended Simon’s Rock College and Drew University as an undergraduate and also holds a M.Ed. in Special Education from American International College. For more information, please see her websites listed below.